Iron Age Europe · 800-279 BC

The Celts: salt, iron and the princes of Hallstatt

North of the Alps, chieftains grew rich on salt and iron and were buried with wagons, gold and Greek wine vessels. Students explore the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures, the first peoples the Greeks called Celts, and follow their warriors as far as Delphi and Anatolia.

Teach it live New Open on the map
Length
50 minutes
Ages
11–14
On the map
3 steps, 600 BC to 279 BC
Live lesson
7 rounds, 3 on the map
Worksheet
Two A4 pages, with Classroom
You need
A projector; phones for live

Live lesson · new in Classroom

Teach it live. The class answers on their phones.

Put the board on the projector. Students join with a six-digit code, no account needed, and tap the map: where was the frontier, where did the grain come from. Their pins drop in together when you reveal, and the closest student takes the round.

€19 per month: every lesson live, every worksheet, cancel anytime. Rome at its height runs live for free.

A live lesson on the projector: the class's pins on the map around Alexandria, the closest students listed beside it A student's phone: the question and a map to tap
7 rounds
3 places to find on the map, quiz questions, a class vote and a one-line answer.
About 15 minutes
Run it as the map step, or to open the discussion. You move on with the space bar.
A report
Every answer, per student and per round, to read back or print after the lesson.
1

Introduction

5 min

Read aloud

North of the Alps, chieftains grew rich on salt and iron and were buried with wagons, gold and Greek wine vessels. Students explore the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures, the first peoples the Greeks called Celts, and follow their warriors as far as Delphi and Anatolia.

By the end of the lesson, students can

  • Locate Hallstatt and La Tene and explain why archaeologists named two periods after them.
  • Describe what the graves of Vix and Hochdorf tell us about Celtic chieftains and their trade with the Greek world.
  • Trace the Celtic migrations of the 300s and 200s BC on the map, including the attack on Delphi in 279 BC.
2

Explore the map

15 min

Project the map, or let students follow on their own devices. Each step opens the map at the right year and place.

a

600 BC

Salt mountain

Open the map in 600 BC on the Austrian Alps and find the lake of Hallstatt, southeast of Salzburg. Salt was mined inside the mountain here for centuries, and a cemetery of over a thousand graves gave its name to the Hallstatt period (about 800-450 BC). Why was salt so valuable to Iron Age farmers?

Open this view on the map
b

400 BC

Celts across Europe

Jump to 400 BC and zoom out. The map now labels a wide band from Spain to the Danube as Celtic Hallstatt culture, with Celts in Britain too. Turn on Trade Routes: the Tin Route and the Amber Road both ran through Celtic lands. What did the Greeks and Etruscans want from the north?

Open this view on the map
c

279 BC

Warriors on the move

Go to 279 BC. Celtic war bands had already taken the Po valley and sacked Rome (around 390 BC). This year a great army attacked Delphi, and in 278 BC three tribes crossed into Anatolia and settled as the Galatians near today's Ankara. Trace that route from the Danube to Delphi and on to Anatolia.

Open this view on the map
3

Class discussion

15 min

Pick two or three. They run from what happened to why it mattered.

  1. The Celts left no written history. We know them through Greek and Roman writers, who were often their enemies, and through graves. What can a grave tell you that a hostile writer cannot?
  2. The "Lady of Vix" was buried around 500 BC with a bronze wine vessel 1.6 m high, made in Greece or southern Italy. Why would a Greek city ship a vessel that size to a chief in Burgundy?
  3. Hochdorf's chieftain lay on a bronze couch with a wagon and a cauldron that had held hundreds of liters of mead. What does a funeral like this say about how power worked?
  4. The Celts never formed one state, yet they shared art styles, gods and languages from Ireland to Anatolia. What held them together, if not a king?
  5. Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Breton are Celtic languages still spoken today. Why did they survive on the western edge of Europe and nowhere else?
4

Game round

10 min

Rule History has no Celtic chief. Play one round as Julius Caesar, who conquered the Celts of Gaul three centuries later and wrote most of what we know about their druids, then ask: how much should we trust a description of a people written by the man conquering them?

Open Rule History
5

Worksheet

5 min

This worksheet comes with Classroom

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